Recently Corsair made some changes to their popular Neutron Series products. Both the base model and GTX have new firmware, new flash and new price points. The Neutron 256GB is now one of the best value SSD's on the market and they are selling like crazy.

Bapco MobileMark 2012 1.5

MobileMark 2012 1.5 is an application-based benchmark that reflects usage patterns of business users in the areas of office productivity, media creation and media consumption. Unlike benchmarks that only measure battery life, MobileMark 2012 measures battery life and performance simultaneously, showing how well a system design addresses the inherent tradeoffs between performance and power management.

Our power chart is filling up again so it's just about time to purge some drives. On the chart the Neutron 256GB is the black line and the 128GB is the pink line. The drives come in the middle of the other all power life, but if you remove the Samsung 840 Pro, Neutron is at the back of the pack.

PCMark Vantage HDD Test - Power Consumption

The same color scheme for Neutron on this chart as well.

Neutron has a very odd power profile. At the very start of the test, there is a glimpse of idle power consumption, but the drive never drops back to that level, even though the eight tests finish before the power log ends.

That means Neutron performs background tasks sooner rather than later. This brings up the write amplification issue. Some SSDs wait to let blocks build, before cleaning the flash. At this stage with 3K and 5K flash it isn't a big issue, but next-generation 1Xnm flash, it might make aggressive garbage collection difficult.

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